Rich Miller – 2010: The Year in Downtime

Lightning storms, floods, car crashes and errant transfer switches were the culprits in his year’s most significant data center outages. There were plenty of high-profile outages for social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and free hosting services (more on this in a moment). But 2010 also saw at least four major outages for e-commerce services, with some disrupting tens of millions of dollars in transactions. There were also incidents that knocked government services offline for days. Here’s a look at the top business-related outages of the year, followed by a roundup of social media downtime.

Jan. 19: Storms KO San Jose Data Center: A NaviSite data center lost power after severe storms knocked out the facility’s utility power from PG&E, causing a lengthy outage for merchants using the eBay ProStores service to operate e-commerce web sites. NaviSite later took steps to overhaul the surge suppression system at its San Jose data center, which didn’t adequately protect relay fuses within an automated transfer switch (ATS) from a power surge.

March 31: Flooded Exchange Disrupts BT Service: Major flooding at a BT telecom exchange point in the Paddington section of London disrupted telecom service and payment networks in parts of London, with some areas taking several days to recover.

More of the Data Center Knowledge article from Rich Miller

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.